About the Book:
Shade by Cody Stewart
Genre: Ya Paranormal
About the Author:
Website: http://codybstewart.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/cody_b_stewart
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/authorcodystewart
Read an excerpt from the book:
Chapter 1
It lives in the cramped spaces between shadows
in the rear right side of my brain, just behind my ear. It wanders relentlessly, scratching along the
pink, fleshy walls of my mind with its unkempt fingernails, shouting
obscenities at other thoughts as they travel across lobes and cortexes. It vomits poison and corrupts my mind with
whispers of death. It reminds me how his
blood felt running down the back of my hands.
How my knuckles tore as they raked across his cheekbones. How his tooth cracked loose from his gums and
the muffled gargle as he choked on it.
It laughs and calls me a coward for running away.
The wind rustles through the pines,
dances into my ears, and carries the vile voice away. It’s quiet here. My thoughts are my own.
The fire pops and a fleet of sparks takes
flight, dancing across the night sky.
Fireflies follow suit taking the initiative to investigate the
imposters. I readjust a log when the
fire dims. It roars to life again and illuminates the decayed insides of the
cabin around me. The wooden frame has
long since rotted. The stone floor and sections of the wall are the only signs
that this was once a structure of some sort.
Muren, my Norwegian Elkhound, refuses to step
through the threshold of these ruins, insisting instead to patrol the
perimeter.
I lie back, using my sweatshirt as a pillow, and
watch for hours as the flames dance like springtime wildflowers until their
petals wilt and fall and all burns to ash.
The sun peeks over the treetops and reaches through the canopy with pale
fingers of morning light just as the last ember dwindles.
Time to go home.
Birds chime in the new day like church bells,
but I still feel heavy with the burdens of yesterday. The walk back is a habit now, following the
trail worn by my feet alone. This is a
thick part of the mountain made thicker with countless stories and a dark
reputation. Few dare walk it.
Dad sits on the front porch sipping his coffee
when I step out of the forest and into the yard. He doesn’t look up from the ground as I come
near or shift or show any signs of surprise or anger. “Get inside and get washed up. You’ve got an appointment with Dr. Hague
before school.”
My parents think I’m crazy. Everyone thinks I’m crazy. It’s hard to blame
them, though. I kind of am.
***
The chemical stink of artificial lavender burns
my sinuses. It’s meant to foster calm
and encourage me to share openly, but I can’t get the taste of it off my
tongue.
“What makes you say that, Clen?” Dr. Hague’s voice has padded walls. “What makes you think people fear you?”
The quiver in their lip as they ask me stupid
questions. “I don’t know. Just a
feeling, I guess.”
“Is that why you run away?”
“I don’t run away. I just need to take breaks sometimes.”
“Breaks from what?”
I stare out the window at the passing school
buses and laughing kids with books tucked under their arms. Packs of them, like roving bands of
scavenging coyotes.
Dr. Hague, the school psychologist, observes me
like an anthropologist studying apes in the jungle. He wants to ask me about
the fight with Jefferson Hewlett, but he doesn’t bother. I’ve been seeing him long enough that he
knows I won’t talk about it so soon.
“How are things at home?” Dr. Hague attempts a change in
direction. He’s trying to throw me off
guard.
“Fine.” But I have an impeccable defense.
“How did your parents react this time?”
“The same.”
“How does that make you feel? That you can run into the woods, disappear
for days, and your parents welcome you back as if nothing happened?” His stare is forceful and constant. I sink
under the weight of it.
“I need to get to class.”
I wash my face as soon as the session is over,
trying to scrub away the smell of therapy before school.
***
I stand still and invisible in the dull, gray
hallways as the horde of apes and coyotes bustles past. They pick fleas out of
each other’s hair and nip at each other’s heels. I stand on the periphery,
hoping they all just pass me by.
One of them veers off course, working his way
through the packs straight toward me. He towers above the rest, the tallest
sophomore in school. He’s broad and blond and has a permanent glint of mischief
in his grayish-blue eyes.
“You’re
going, right? I know you have this
mysterious loner persona that you love to project, but this party is going to
be epic.”
Oliver Niels seems to be the only
one who’s never felt the need to run from me or throw things at the back of my
head. He’s been my sole friend since
second grade.
“I’m not feeling it tonight, Ollie.”
“You’re never feeling it, Clen. I think you were born without whatever part
of your brain actually feels it. Or
maybe, I saw this special on the Discovery Channel once about a guy who got in
this serious accident, banged his head real bad, and all of sudden spoke in a
British accent. You ever experience any
head trauma? Seriously, if I wasn’t your
friend, you’d never come off the mountain.
You’d be a hermit, grow a huge, gross beard and eat squirrel stew. There’d be legends about you. The Hermit of Mount Bannir – died sad and
alone with squirrel on his breath.”
Ollie’s voice fades away like a
passing echo when I have to venture into the horde to get to class. Cologne and scented body lotions coat my
nostrils, and my throat closes from the olfactory assault. The chatter grows to an indecipherable roar
of voices that crashes down around me like a relentless wave. Ollie’s voice sounds far away, like he’s
yelling at me from the beach as I’m dragged out to sea.
A thick mane of black hair slaps me
in the face as it passes. The sweet,
natural smell of it lingers. I meet one
set of eyes among the hundreds swarming like bees around me. As pure and green as the first leaves of
spring. The deafening roar dulls to
gentle whisper.
Temporarily blinded by the rare shimmer of beauty among the streaked linoleum and
concrete walls, I crash into Silas Conroy, my forehead bloodying his lower lip.
“The hell, Kiernan?! You looking to get dead?” Silas snarls like a rabid dog, tagging the
wall with red graffiti. His black hair
is shaved on the sides, giving him a short Mohawk. His left ear is mostly missing, just bits of
jagged scar tissue. His eyes are dark
and shallow.
Something hisses in the base of my skull. It’s a
cold tickle, a drop of ice water that flows down the length of my spine. But
it’s still quiet enough that I can ignore it.
“Easy, Silas.”
Ollie steps forward to shield me as I pick up my books. “It was an accident.”
“Protecting him is an accident, Niels. You should side with your own people.”
“You aren’t any kind of people I would claim as
my own.”
“I still owe you big for what you did to
Jefferson,” Silas snarls at me. “Your
bodyguard won’t always be around to protect you, Kiernan.” He cackles like a
hyena as he saunters off.
Ollie lifts me off the floor like he always
does.
The beautiful green eyes disappear among the
horde.
***
Lunch is a wretched ordeal as usual. I slide my tray along the counter, the lunch
ladies looking on like hair-netted prison guards. They heap scorn on my plate,
piled high atop a mountain a gritty mashed potatoes.
Kids stack their books in empty seats as I pass.
I know I’m not welcome at any of their tables. They all know I’d never dare
attempt to be in their company, they do it anyway, every day, just to make it
painfully clear. There’s a small table in the back corner, by the garbage cans
and emergency exit. It smells and the bitter wind howls through the doors in
the winter. That’s where I sit.
I eat fast so I can leave before the rest. If
I’m here when they scrape their plates, I’m likely to end up with creamed corn
all over the front of me. The lunch monitors herd us out the side doors to the
athletic field to mill about for a mandatory twenty five minutes of fresh air.
I shove my hands in my sweatshirt pockets and head straight for the tree by the
road. I sit in its shadow, hidden from the late spring sun and the spiteful
sneers of my peers.
The crowd immediately divides in two. Half of the field is black hoodies, gauged
ears, and work boots – kids from the Pines.
The other half is skinny jeans, nice watches, and gelled hair – kids
from the Village. They’ve hated each other
for as long as I can remember. Not just
the kids either. Everyone. I don’t live
in either neighborhood, which only means I’m equally hated by both.
Dr. Hague is on monitoring duty today. He wanders down the center of the field,
scratching his chin and nodding. He
starts for me, knowing I spend this time under my tree and not among my peers
as he prescribed, but thankfully, thinks better of it. Being seen with the school shrink would do
nothing to improve matters. Instead he makes for a tight circle of kids on the
Pines side of the field emanating the faint smell of cigarette smoke.
As I watch him scold and lecture, a rock hits my
shoe. I don’t need to look up to know who it is.
“What do you want, Silas?”
“You’ve got debts, Kiernan. First, you lose it
on Jefferson. The kid damn near choked
on his own tooth. Then you bloody my lip
because you’re too stupid to watch where you’re going. Time to settle. And Ollie ain’t here to save you.”
“Leave me alone.”
“No, I don’t think I’m gonna do that.” Silas grabs me by the collar and rips me from
the pleasant shadow.
The whisper in my head becomes a harsh cry,
demanding that I retaliate. I try to take steady, even breaths, to keep my
heart beating a normal rhythm. Dr. Hague
said that will keep me calm. Then my feet leave the ground, and I’m weightless
for half a second before crashing back to earth. All my calming breath is forced from my
lungs. The harsh cry becomes a vicious growl.
A circle quickly forms around us. Kids from the Pines and the Village alike
gather to watch my humiliation. I’m the great unifier.
Pressure builds behind my eyes. Dr. Hague says I just need to
concentrate. I can’t let it control me.
“What?
You aren’t gonna go all ape nuts on me like you did Jefferson?”
“You’ve got anger issues, Silas. I know a good shrink who could help you out
with that.”
Silas cocks his arm back, ready to split my
skull with a wicked punch.
“Enough,” a commanding voice orders. Dr. Hague pushes his way through the
circle. “Everyone inside now! Silas, to the principal’s office. Clen.” He shakes his head, sad and
disappointed. “Get to class.”
***
I’m the only passenger on my bus. The school repurposed a utility van
specifically for me. Kids point and
chuckle when I get on, but their voices die when the door closes. The drive is quiet.
I stare mindlessly out the window as we drive
through town. Ellis is a boring, little
hole in the world carved out of mountain and forest. It’s bordered in the north by the Tear of
Heaven, a massive glacial lake and surrounded on the other three sides by the
Moreau Mountains. Town is divided in
half by the River Skye, which flows from the Tear of Heaven all the way down to
Hudson City – Lakeside Village on the East, everything else on the West.
The engine groans and sputters as we climb Mount
Bannir. Sal, the bulbous driver who
smells of beef jerky, curses his misfortune at drawing the short straw of
school bus routes. He pulls to a stop at
the end of my driveway, a dirt road that seems to have no end. It twists and turns until it is swallowed by
the dark of the dense forest. Sal won’t
drive in there. He dismisses me with a guttural grunt.
I’m thankful for the walk. The forest swallows
the light and, with it, all the anxiety that’s built up in the back of my mind
over the course of the day.
“How was therapy?” Mom asks as she slides dinner
in the oven. Dad suddenly shifts
uncomfortably and hides his head in the fridge.
“Fine.”
Mom stiffens. Her hands become tightly clenched
fists inside her oven mitts. “That’s all
I’m ever going to get from you, isn’t it?”
“I need to take a shower.”
“Safe to say you’re grounded,” Mom calls as I
walk away.
“Fine.” I
set my bag in my room, gather some clean clothes and make for the
bathroom. I stop at the top of the
stairs when I hear the hushed whispers.
“We can’t keep doing this, Clark.” Mom’s frantic, on the verge of either yelling
or crying. “He was gone for two
days. Sleeping out in the woods
somewhere. We had no way of knowing whether
he was even alive or not.”
“Muren was with him. He was fine, Sarah.”
“He is not fine.
He attacked somebody. And we just
send him off to that doctor like it’s going to fix something. This is not a problem Dr. Hague can fix.”
“We don’t have any other choice.”
“Yes, we do,” Mom snaps. “If you would just talk to him, tell him…”
“No,” Dad declares curtly. “We made a decision. We need to stick to it.”
Mom’s feet pound angrily on the floor as she
storms off. Dad curses under his breath.
***
My parents are in bed early. The tense night of passive aggressive
scowling and openly aggressive yelling must have tired them out.
I cautiously open my bedroom window
and scale down the pine tree next to the house.
Ollie is waiting for me at the end of my driveway.
“Well, look at you,” he says as I climb
in the passenger seat. “You showered and
even brushed your hair. If I didn’t know
any better, I’d say you were looking forward to this.”
“You don’t know any better. I couldn’t be looking forward to this any
less.”
“Don’t be such a sad, old man. You might as well slip on some loafers and a
sweater vest, talking like that. Read a
romance novel. Eat a sleeve of saltines. I know deep down somewhere in that dark pit
of despair you call a soul there is a tiny flickering light. And do you know what that light is?”
I immediately regret getting in
Ollie’s car. “No, nor do I care.”
“Youthful exuberance. Passion.
A desire to grab life by its delicates and howl at the moon.”
“I’m not grabbing anything by its
delicates.”
“I’m talking about living!” Ollie throws his arms toward the sky in an
exaggerated, theatrical gesture.
“Tonight you’re going to do some living.
You’re going to talk to pretty girls, maybe tip some things over. You’re going to act reckless and swear and
yell and at no point in the night will you use the word nor. You’re going to act like a real sixteen year
old, not the angst-ridden, chiseled jaws you see on the CW. We’re going to the Raveyard.”
The Raveyard is a local legend. One of the original settlers of Ellis,
Abigail Moreau, lived alone, in the mountains.
One year, crops failed, livestock disappeared, houses burned down,
people dropped dead for no apparent reason.
The townspeople accused her of witchcraft. They marched up there in true angry mob fashion,
pitchforks and torches in hand, and killed her.
They named the mountain range after her.
It was the least they could do, I suppose. Now she’s said to haunt Ellis, looking to
exact her ghostly revenge. The Raveyard
is a large clearing in the woods where Abigail was said to bury her victims. Now it’s a place to party.
“Whatever.” I hunch down in my seat
and pull my hood over my head. Let’s
just get this night over with.”
“That’s the spirit.”
The Raveyard is only a few minutes
away from my house, in the foothills of Mount Bannir. Ollie turns down an old logging trail that
empties into the large clearing, slowing to a crawl as his car jostles over
roots and rocks and holes in the ground.
I take one long, deep breath, like it’s my last taste of air before
diving deep to the ocean floor, and get out of the car. The infinite weight of the sea presses down
on me. I cling close to Ollie. He’s my only lifeline, my only source of
oxygen while navigating the dark trenches so far below.
The heat of their stares pales that
of the raging bonfire. The salty sea
water is like acid on the burns. I’m so
distracted by the pain that I don’t notice the riptide until I’m already caught
up in it. I reach back for Ollie, but
he’s pulled in a different direction, one with straight black hair, eyes that
smile and skin like the failing light of morning. I’m churned and battered against craggy shore
as the sharks circle round. My lungs
burn and scream. My head fills with plankton
and algae that feed off the soft tissue of my brain. I’m spit out the other side, gasping and
broken.
I collapse against a tree and cling
to it, desperate for a new lifeline. The
smell of the smoke, pine, and birch fill my nose. The crackle of the kindling as it splits and
burns rings like a song in my ears. I
run my hands across the rough bark, tracing each crack with my fingers. Its sap sticks in the hair on my knuckles. I picture the perfect green eyes that passed
too quickly. Eventually, the sound of
voices fades away. The stink of cologne
and anxiety disappears. The world
disappears.
“Are you sleeping? We’ve been here, like, ten minutes and you’re
sleeping against a tree. Have you even
tipped anything over yet?”
“Ollie, can we just…” As I slowly
open my eyes, reluctant to let the world back in, I see that he isn’t
alone. The girl that pulled him to a
different shore smiles kindly, her soft, dark eyes beaming from behind her
raven bangs.
“This is Suzume Akamura,” Ollie
declares with an oafish smile. “Su, this
is Clendon Kiernan.”
“Hey,” I choke out, recognizing her
from school. She’s a freshman.
“Hi.” Her voice is smooth and steady. “How’s it going?”
“Umm, good?” I reply, cautious and
confused. Ollie glares at me, silently
demanding I be cool.
Su fidgets with her hands. “I’ll be right back. I need to let my friends know where I
am.” She disappears around the other
side of the fire, her steps gaining more confidence the further away from me
she gets.
Ollie pinches the bridge of his nose
and shakes his head in exasperation.
“Could you be any more awkward?
It only takes you two words to send someone scurrying away. You’ve talked to other people beside me
before, right?”
“She’s from the Village. I thought you kids from the Pines weren’t
allowed to talk to them.”
“I can talk to whoever I want.”
“Hey, it’s your feud. I just don’t want to go out like Mercutio.”
“Who?”
“Romeo’s best friend. Got killed because of the Capulet-Montague
feud? We read it last year in
English.”
Ollie shrugs.
“How do you pass classes?”
“Charm.”
A familiarly raven-haired boy
marches toward us from the edge of the Raveyard. He’s thin and wiry. He’s a junior, I think. His dark eyes are like empty holes in his
head.
“Where is she?” he demands. “Where is Su?”
I lean in close to Ollie’s ear so
only he can hear me. “See? This is what I’m talking about. I’m not dueling anyone.”
“Hey, Yori. Su is around somewhere.” Ollie scans the
crowd with his hand to his brow, like a sailor taking stock of the sea.
“Stay away from my sister,
Niels.” Yori doesn’t seem to mind that
he barely comes up to Ollie’s shoulder.
He puffs out his chest and huffs authoritatively.
Ollie leans back casually with his
hands tucked in his pockets, impressively letting Yori’s obnoxious commands
roll off him. Others aren’t so passive.
“Problem?” Brian Till, a boy from
the Pines, steps forward. Till rivals
Ollie in size, but has none of his restraint.
“None of your business,” Yori spits.
“I think it is,” Till growls and
crosses his arms, threateningly flexing every muscle he can.
Others gather around, anticipating
bloodied knuckles and broken faces. The
crowd erupts, hurling curses and insults like monkeys with their own
feces.
The capillaries in my eyes pulse
with steadily building intensity. The
pressure pushes outward on the fissures in my skull. The rumbling voices bleed together and fade
away. The hateful whisper in my head is
the only sound in the world.
I hum a song to drown it out, but it
devours the music like a rabid dog. I
try to push it out my ears, scrape it off my tongue, swallow and digest
it. But it won’t quiet. I step back from the crowd and dissolve in
the darkness at the edge of the forest.
It wraps around me like a snug blanket.
I run and let my feet take me where they want to go.
The whisper soon quiets, and I hear
the crickets and cicadas and the crunch of the ground beneath me. The soft plodding of my feet on dirt and
leaves turns to the course grinding of crushed stone. I’ve stepped into another clearing. My stomach tightens and twists in knots, and
the hairs stand up on the back of my neck as a cold shiver runs down my spine. A haunting and familiar feeling creeps over me,
like a wave of spiders. The core of me
goes cold. Every breeze is a whisper
telling me to leave. Every little noise
is the ground telling me it doesn’t want me here.
The moon creeps out from behind some
clouds, illuminating the jagged tree line at the far end of the clearing to
show that it’s not trees at all. It is
the charred husk of an old house. The
roof has collapsed. Only small sections
of the walls are still standing.
Everything inside is cinder and ash.
“Clen? Where’d you go?” Ollie calls
from behind me. “Sorry about this,” he
says quietly to someone else. “I think
he’s got a touch of Social Anxiety Disorder or something.”
“Sorry about my brother,” Su
replies. “He’s a jerk.”
They stumble out of the forest. Yori follows close after, still making
demands.
There’s something strange about this
place – something both comforting and terrifying at once. My brain is adrift in a pool of déjà vu. It feels like I exist in two worlds at the
same time, and, with each blink of my eyes, I am transported from one to the
other. I am standing in an eerie
clearing in the middle of the woods, terrified out of my mind. Blink. I’m playing at a home I know well,
comfortable and safe. Blink.
I exchange unpleasant, untrusting looks with people I’ve just met. Blink. I’m surrounded by friends as close as
family. Blink. Darkness. Everything is covered in darkness and
fear. Blink. The fear swims in
their eyes, now just black, empty orbs. Blink.
Emptiness.
I flash from one world to the other
so fast that I lose track of which one is real, which one is mine.
Like there’s a rope tied around my
insides, I’m pulled toward the house.
The icy feeling in the center of my chest spreads throughout the rest of
my body, chilling my blood and bones to the marrow. I stumble a few yards from the wreckage,
tripping over an unseen object. A
Nintendo DS. I pick it up and a current
of electricity shoots up my arm. My
muscles spasm, and a vivid scene of anguish flashes through my mind like a bolt
of lightning.
The world around me changes. The house is whole again. A young boy stands in front of it. Veins pulse violently in his neck as he
screams from the very pit of his soul.
Tears stream down his cheeks, but evaporate before they reach his
chin. Then the world erupts in fire, and
ash blots out the sun. The boy disappears,
swallowed in flame. As the world I know
returns, I find myself screaming for the boy, reaching out for him.
Ollie rushes to my side, again offering a hand
to lift me off the ground. “He’s
freaking out. We need to get out of
here.”
The fires burn hotter behind my eyes.
“No,” Yori says. “We need to get out of here. You two need to stay away from us. He’s clearly insane, and I don’t trust you.”
Hot flames dance on my skin and
smoke fills my lungs. The smell of
blistering flesh sets acid churning in my stomach.
I feel death in the air. Cold.
Absolute. It’s inside me,
scratching at the lining of my stomach, clawing its way out. The beating inside my skull grows faster and
stronger, like a dozen horses racing around a track, feet and hearts pounding.
They round the last turn. Their muscles
explode like gunfire. Pound, pound, pound. The animal sounds mix in a chaotic symphony
of noise and agony that crescendo as they reach the finish line. Pound,
pound, pound.
It whispers in my head. A vile hiss from a wretched little snake.
Kill them.
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